Dear Dr. Schymanski and Dr. Bolton,

Please accept my appreciation for your thoughtful Letter to the Editor “FAIR-ifying the Exposome Journal: templates for chemical structures and transformations.” In your letter you emphasize the importance of making data findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR), and note that merely having data be “open” does not mean that it is FAIR. You also challenge our new journal to embrace the ethos of data FAIRness and on behalf of the Journal I gladly accept the challenge. Advancing the science of the exposome will surely benefit from having the underlying data follow FAIR guidelines. Such efforts will allow findings from the Journal to be machine readable, which is becoming more important as computational methods are allowing reanalysis, merging of datasets, and the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to mine for previously unidentified associations.

The challenge for the Journal is to strike the balance between advocating for FAIR while not placing undue burden on authors. As a new journal we must work hard to attract submissions. We don’t want to set a bar so high that it discourages submissions. Rather, we want to demonstrate to authors that taking advantage of these FAIR-promoting offerings will make publishing in Exposome more attractive than publishing in other journals. Indeed, I am of the view that making one’s data FAIR increases the impact of a published paper.

We are working with our publishers at Oxford University Press to develop the necessary workflows, but as you point out, authors can already achieve many of the goals by depositing their underlying data in data repositories. Authors should include the raw data, code, and workflows used to collect and analyze their data. I anticipate that it will take a few months to develop the journal’s guidelines for working toward FAIR data and additional time to get authors comfortable with the expanded Instructions for Authors. As such, we will encourage authors to adhere to our soon-to-be-updated FAIR guidelines, but we will not yet mandate this for all submissions. However, the Journal is committed to advocating for FAIR with our authorship. I laud your commitment to open science and your efforts to enhance the value of our scientific data. The field of the exposome will undoubtedly benefit from the FAIRification of our research.